The Eggshell Sanctuary
Back at the beginning, she could count among her possessions: a man, a marriage, a too-small bed in a too-big flat, two bicycles, a gas stove, and long walks through teeming, humid beaches.
That day began like any other.
After the banality of her morning routine, a work commute in a suffocating bus, an afternoon at the office laced with the usual admixture of ennui and dread, she travelled to the market and purchased gourds of all kinds for dinner—some ridged with furrows on their skin, some long and velvety-slick, and some armed with jagged, haphazard teeth to safeguard the bitter flesh within. She briefly considered the pods of tamarind packed tightly into obsidian slabs, its pulp glimmering against the hurricane lamps that came alive at dusk.
She picked up a slab and returned home.
After a ride in a less-suffocating bus, she prepared a stew of tamarind and jaggery and half-moons of bitter melon that failed to meet his arbitrary needs. An argument ensued. They spun around the too-small bed arguing about everything, about nothing. They argued until they forgot what they were arguing about and continued anyway, invoking their vast reserves of misplaced stubbornness, because giving in now would simply be unwise. Their decibel levels rose steadily. He shouted. She shouted right back.
At that precise moment, something smooth and brittle and solid slipped through her lips, and she involuntarily spat it out on the cotton duvet. And there it was—two cracked halves of a quail’s eggshell, dappled in yellows and browns, slicked with remnant bits of her dinner.
Soon, the flat filled with eggshell shards of all kinds. Sometimes, they spattered out of her mouth in pyrotechnic displays of rage or despair, coating every surface in her immediate vicinity with calcium-carbonate specks that shone like exclamation points. At other times, when a seething malaise began thrumming at her tailbone—rising up through the curve of her vertebrae and detonating at the base of her skull—she felt her gut folding into pleats across her abdomen, as if attempting to gasp, to breathe. Her neck contracted into a vomit-sneeze then, until an almost-whole eggshell pushed itself out of her mouth.
*
They began visiting a conveyor belt of doctors whose declarations of her normalcy arranged themselves into a choral refrain of no no nos and you’re perfectly all rights and have you been exercizehotyogaunicycling and here’s a good psychologist and you need sleep, of course you need sleep, please sleep, I, we, insist you sleep.
After the doctors, his brief flare-up of concern for her hardened into impatience. He convinced himself that she had shoved eggs into her mouth as a deliberate, nauseating ruse, the mechanics of which escaped him.
So, he took to hiding.
He began folding himself under tables and into cupboards. He held himself very still in tight, dark corners of the flat. He would leap out and ambush her at odd intervals, hoping somehow that in startling her, she would lead him to her undisclosed reserve of eggs and admit to her treachery, or a sudden, offbeat sense of humor, or maybe even an arcane interest in oology.
What it was he wanted, he could not say.
It did not help that the shock of his initial raids made her shriek out cracked halves of bile-slicked eggshells that only served to reinforce her growing disregard for him. It did not help that she kept all her shells—and he hated referring to them as hers per se, but they were—from the toenail-like shards that began appearing in furtive stacks in the living room, to the ones nested carefully between tea-towels in dressers that she had bought expressly for this purpose.
It seemed as though every conceivable surface—as far as his eye could withstand seeing—was caked with them, forming a calcium-rich testa around the perimeter of the house, around the body of her, as she moved unseeing around the figure of him, around the desiccated scrap of her feelings, of his, a shelled carcass.
He left one day, as she knew he would.
Slowly, methodically, her spaces tipped into his. She claimed his sink for the duck and chicken eggs, hilly undulations of white and green glistening against the dull tint of the porcelain.
Mallard, she would whisper, running her hands through them. Leghorn. Eurasian Teal.
His office became a conservatory for the rarer, almost-whole specimens. They dozed quietly in floor-to-ceiling armoires, each drawer housing eggs of increasing sizes.
One Tuesday, she removed an oval eggshell out of the topmost drawer. Pockmarked with red bumps that levelled into lavender-grey bands, it sat quietly on her palm.
White-rumped vulture, she mouthed.
On an earlier Tuesday, unlike any Tuesday that had come before, much like every other Tuesday that had come after, she discovered to her mild surprise that brick walls were more porous than concrete, and thus more suited to the ribbons of pain tearing through her body as she crashed into its surface and bounced back onto the floor. Afterwards, her slow creep across the tiles of the living room interrupted by his feet on her hip bone, sternum, forehead.
And then, the door being bolted shut. His footsteps retreating.
And then, an unfamiliar revulsion.
She welcomed this new pressure uncoiling against her curled self with a desperate gulp of need for something close to a release. There was a calm in the air as the eggshell—whole, she knew—almost ripped the blue-tinged skin across her clavicles as it swelled alarmingly outwards, worming itself out of her esophagus, her throat. Then the heave, the impossible lurch as her head lolled backwards—for this one was bigger than everything else that had come before—and she lay gasping, white froth pooling at the sides of her mouth. The shell shone in the predawn light, its red bumps illuminated by the ropes of her spittle that webbed around its surface.
It was the loveliest one yet.
*
She withdrew almost entirely from anything that laid outside the boundary of her flat—only allowing herself to inhabit the semi-permeable landscape of her bedroom, her kitchen, her bathroom.
Eventually, familial concern slowly trickled in through the windows and pooled under her doorways. Every evening, her mother attempted to speak to her. Her stomach hummed in anticipation as the phone rang.
How are you, kanna? her mother asked, calling her by a childhood endearment that singed the top of her ears.
Amma, I’m okay. I eat. I sleep. I bathe—, she said, her words immediately knotting into apology-laced assertions.
Bathe?
Sometimes.
What does he think? her mother finally asked.
Her gut began to churn.
I can feed and bathe myself, ma. I can.
The churning soared upwards. It culminated in an almost-pleasant column of discomfort that streaked across her jawline. Her mouth contorted as she ended the conversation with her mother, a pale shard falling from her lips.
She picked it up and pushed it gently into her wrist. She savored the shard’s pressure as its blunt, cool edge punctured the scrim of her skin.
*
With time, the eggshells began changing in shape, tone, and intensity, appearing sporadically at first, and then almost not at all. When they eventually did appear, they were weak approximations of what they had once been.
Pale rockfinch. Silverbill.
The names of smaller and still smaller birds tumbled out of her mouth and hung in the air as though in absolution, or warning.
Plain-backed sparrow.
The names began to fade as soon as they appeared, falling right through her as though she was blurry, indistinct.
*
One evening, a decision congealed around her skull.
She oiled and combed her hair, letting it pour in tumbling curls down her shoulders.
She sloughed off all her clothes and sat cross-legged on the floor of her living room. Her feelings quietly spun out of her in great coils—the larger ones arcing into a parabola of off-whites and speckled blues. Bustard, she whispered fondly. Cormorant. Kestrel. Condor.
The smaller eggshells sliced through the rest of the flat in crisscrossing lines of browns, greens, and fleshy pinks. They traced pathways from the emptied dressers and armoires to the balcony, the kitchen counter, the windowsill.
Uneven pieces of eggshell shards lay askance like sea-glass, flattening into tinier and even tinier slivers that rayed outwards. They spilled out of her doorway and down the steps of her building, a roadmap to the nucleus of her.
People bustling about on the streets trickled into her house, intrigued. Some of them were brave, pelting her with small stones or soft fruit, sometimes jabbing at her with tree branches. But they soon wearied of her lack of a response, unnerving in its placidity.
Dusk slanted in under the windows. She cradled an oblong eggshell in her arms. She waited for something, or someone. For him perhaps, or maybe even another. After a week or a year or an instant, she felt a tightening across her pelvic floor, her gut clenching in anticipation for what was to come.